Dumpster divers of the world, unite. Last week, food waste activist Rob Greenfield offered to pay the fines and bring some media attention to anyone who gets arrested or ticketed for taking and eating tossed food.

In 2009, Dr. Ann Thorndike and a team of researchers implemented a change in the Massachusetts General Hospital cafeteria. Foods received green, yellow or red dots to show where foods were ranked on a spectrum of choices. As the hospital described it, “green for the healthiest items, such as fruits, vegetables and lean sources of protein; yellow for less healthy items; and red for those with little or no nutritional value.”

Known to many as “traffic light” labels, this system had been championed by everyone from the hospital’s wellness program to its VP of human resources. “Everyone was talking about it,” Dr. Thorndike says. “If we were going to do this, I wanted to study it and make sure that it worked.”Read more

Whether its canned goods or pantry items, most people leave food behind when they move. As one whose family ran a moving company, Adam Lowry saw pounds of food go to waste. Until one day, he had an idea.

“We figured we’d just ask people,” recalls the founder and executive director of Move for Hunger, a hunger relief organization that works with relocation. “In the first month we collected 300 pounds of food.” Read more

Last August, 28-year-old Tara Whitsitt took a vintage school bus and filled it with fermented foods, live cultures, and a “fermentation station” before setting out on a yearlong project to travel the United States. In just six months, Fermentation on Wheels has already made 27 stops in six different states. Read more